Core Support and Exercise in Postpartum: An Expert Interview

Recently, I had the great privilege of interviewing Catherine Middlebrooks, mom and the founder of Heal Your Core with Yoga.

Turns out, it was such an AMAZING interview, we knew we needed to share it with far more women.

 

 

In this expert interview, Catherine dives into:

 

• The connection between physical and emotional health.
• When one should begin exercise in postpartum and what that looks like
• All things diastasis recti, prolapse, urinary incontinence, and more
• The role of a pelvic floor physical therapist
• And so much more!

Transcript of Interview:

(Please note that this transcript has been loosely edited and probably contains many errors. Links are also affiliate links.)

Maranda:

Hey everyone it’s Maranda Bower and I am here with you today with Catherine Middlebrooks and I have to tell you… we were just chatting before she even came on and I probably said I am excited about 20 times because I am so so so happy to be here.

I’m actually a little star-struck. So Catherine Middlebrooks if you don’t know who she is she’s a yoga teacher and she’s a postpartum health expert, a wife, a mom and she is the founder of BRB yoga. Come and heal your core with yoga.

I have literally followed her work for years. Many of you know that I have an affiliate program to her work because I have used it and I use it for my clients and we all have amazing results in healing our bodies.

[Catherine] truly has the mind of a researcher and the heart of a yogi and she really does touch on the science behind corrective exercises and helping moms like you restore your core strength so that you can say yes to life again.

So welcome Catherine!

Catherine:

No thank you for having me Maranda and I’m so excited to chat with you!

Maranda:

Okay you have to start off and tell us how did this all transpire for you.

Catherine:

Well like most good stories I think it started with my own experience. So when my daughter was born my first child in 2012 I had a very textbook beautiful pregnancy with like a natural birth and delivery and I was doing yoga basically up till the day she was born.

I ran into my third trimester and I truly was cocky about my body’s ability to bounce back I had these expectations that I was just gonna, you know, six weeks after get right back into running. Get right back into yoga and I was going to be good to go and it didn’t play out like that at all.

It is very very different from that I went to my midwife at six weeks. I got checked for diastasis and she was like, “you’re fine, go ahead and do everything you did before you got pregnant” as so many of us are told.

But it turns out that I did have an abdominal separation and I started back into a relatively gentle yoga practice. I had been a yoga instructor for over 10 years at that point and despite that I had no understanding of the fact that many of these simple yoga poses that I was doing were actually making things worse with my core instead of bringing them my muscles back together, I was doing things that were pulling the muscles further apart making the connective tissue thinner and weaker.

No thank you. Thank you for all you do for your momma’s and thank you for having me. Beautiful things.

So my experience was then that nine months postpartum I felt worse than I did immediately after I gave birth. I was weaker I felt like a limp noodle whenever I was sitting in a chair. I just didn’t have the strength that I wanted or expected to have and so that started me on a path of really, basically, taking ownership over my own postpartum experience and doing a ton of research. I got certified as a postpartum corrective exercise specialist which then I sort of incorporated what I was learning with the yoga practice and developed a yoga practice that was designed to bring my core muscles back together and heal my body.

And with that practice really everything shifted for me and I started to feel stronger and I could run again and I could get on the floor and play with my kids. As a teacher at heart, I love to teach I started to share it with other women and it has grown from there. So BRB yoga was created and I have heal your core program, which is designed for core strength but I also have programs for hips and pelvic floor. It’s like I was able to find this passion that I didn’t know that I really had and was just for helping moms.

I think that for me, motherhood really sparked something new in me. This sense of “I want to create something bigger than myself” and so I feel really lucky that what I have been able to create is something that is able to help so many other moms also create something bigger than themselves. Because they feel whole and complete again in their bodies.

Maranda:

That is absolutely beautiful and that is the reason why I do the work that I do. It started with my own journey in postpartum and experiencing depression and anxiety and wanting to learn why that has happened to myself and what happens to so many other women. Then going through that research and certifications and all sorts of things and the healing process and then coming out on the other side sharing this information with others so that they can they, in turn, can feel whole and feel well. So that they can give to themselves and their families in ways that feels good to them.

So I absolutely love it.  Amazing. Thank you! I love it and I think that what you’re doing is so beautiful too. And it ties in so well with what I do so I’m really excited for the conversation.

So you have to tell me, in your research and your experience… when should one start exercising after childbirth what is that what does that look like in terms of a timeline? How you even begin doing that?

Catherine:

That’s a great question because we do not get very good guidance from health care professionals in general on this topic. So most of us will get the all-clear for exercise at six or eight weeks postpartum. And then we’re told we can go back to whatever it was that we did before we got pregnant and in many cases what that instruction does is set up women to actually make their problems worse rather than better. So in general, I like to look at the first four months postpartum as a particularly vulnerable period for the body. If you think about it, the abdominal muscles have expanded so much so, you’re just completely lacking stability in the core and that can really make the spine vulnerable, the pelvis vulnerable.

So the first four months you want to not be doing super high impact activity. You want to be doing low-impact walking – it’s fantastic – you want to be doing simple exercises that are working to engage the keep core muscles. Deep breathing it’s a really great thing to be doing in those first four months so you can be moving but you want to be moving slowly gently and in ways that aren’t kind of stretching you open. This way they’re really more bringing everything together in the center. That’s the first four months.

I would say in the first six to eight weeks you can walk you can do deep breathing but you really shouldn’t be doing anything more than that that. And simple core engagement. Your body needs to rest and rest is an extremely important part of the healing process.

Maranda:

It’s not like carrying a baby who’s, you know, six to ten pounds or whatever the case may be and rocking and swaying and then we have diaper bags and car seats and going up and down stairs. As if that wasn’t enough exercise.

Catherine:

Right and even ideally we would not be doing as much of that as we do in the first few weeks because, especially when the core is so very vulnerable, those heavy one-sided actions can really just create some pressure dynamics in the body that make the core worse.

So once you get to that four-month period then you can start incorporating some more intense stuff but you want to do it really slowly. A lot of people I think are so excited to get back into exercise and I know that I was. When they go out on their first run or to their first yoga class they overdo it and you have to think: the body hasn’t been doing these things for a long time. Especially if you took that four months to rest and maybe you had some time during your pregnancy where you weren’t doing that stuff. So you want to ease back in.

You want to be doing short bursts of activity rather instead of going for a three-mile run do some run walk intervals where you maybe run for 30 seconds and then you walk and you give your muscles a chance to rest and reset before you go back into that intense activity. But even then you want to be watching for symptoms that something isn’t right. For many women, if they overdo it or if their body hasn’t quite healed in that postpartum period, then they’ll have things like leaking or they’ll have back pain when they finish doing something, or they just will feel like their core is a limp noodle, kind of like I did.

And those are not things to ignore. Those are the body’s signals telling you “hey I just need a little bit more time and a little bit more attention to bring everything back together to make everything stronger before you take me out into these higher intensity activity”.

Especially if you’re breastfeeding. The hormones of breastfeeding create a lot of laxity in the body and so I work with many women who do extended breastfeeding and so then you really want to think that the entire time you’re breastfeeding, you just need to be more mindful and more aware and more observant of the signals that your body is sending you.

I look back on my postpartum period time and I I think if I had just paid more attention to my body I wouldn’t have ended up nine months out feeling so bad because I would have stopped doing a lot of the things that, after I did them, I felt worse.

Maranda:

So many things that you had shared here which I think are super important is being mindful, of course, of your body and also things like deep breathing – that is a form of exercise. I’ve learned this through you. The deep breathing and the posture and being aware of your posture and standing correctly, even that, for many women, and I know it was for myself too, very challenging in the beginning. That and it sitting is a form of exercise which I think is absolutely amazing and beautiful.

So going through your program and relearning what it means to be a person who exercises in  postpartum.. it doesn’t necessarily have to be the high impact or the running or the weight lifting or whatever it was before. That’s not necessarily what we need to do in order to feel good again. A lot of women want to lose the baby weight or all of those things, but really, if we take it down to the basics, you know, learning how to do the deep breathing and learning how to stand tall and correctly or  sit and not be a limp noodle… that works in building a solid core and a solid foundation for ourselves. Therefore we can use that to propel forward in a way that’s more beneficial and do the other things without failing.

And I think that’s absolutely amazing and something that we don’t always talk about because we’re so quick to get into, you know, the whole idea of get your body back right some really big industry and all of those things so it is yeah I could not agree with all of that more. I think that that is one of the hardest things for women is to slow down in this period and actually see it not six weeks of rest and then back to business as usual. But really look at it as at least a nine month or a year long process of slowly rebuilding the body so that you can do all of those things that you’re so desperate to do. But know you can do them better and you’ll be able to do them for longer because you won’t be injured doing them or you’ll be able to get back into  whatever it is that you want to do be able to do easier. Because you’re coming at it with a strong body that is able to handle that pressure.

And this goes right along to how I always teach postpartum is never the first six weeks it extends for lost women this first six years after having a baby and I and I teach this all the time. It’s between three to six years depending on how well you support yourself in that first year after having given birth. And this is a significant part of it because the way we feel physically will affect us emotionally and spiritually and mentally. You know if we are constantly tinkling every time that we laugh or sneeze, we’re gonna feel really bad about that and we’re gonna beat ourselves up for it. This is generally the process of it and we might even feel shame and resentment toward our body for failing.

I’ve seen so many different avenues of where that goes but it comes with deep feelings and so it’s super important that we take care of that and build a solid foundation so that it doesn’t happen and that we are able to take care of ourselves and do all of those things.

But tell us, what happens if we didn’t know and we didn’t understand that this was the process until we’re here two or three years later in postpartum and we feel like the limp noodle, which is so very common.

Catherine:

It’s so so common, and what I always want women who feel like they’re too far gone. Know that it’s never too late to begin doing the work to rebuild your body. I use the term rebuild not as in get your body back, it’s really rebuilding just in that you have really predictable muscular imbalances that are created during pregnancy so the rebuilding is just bringing the body back to its normal state of balance. So when you think about it like that, of course you can do three years out or 30 years out. There’s nothing that happens at the one-year period where it’s like “no you can’t now bring your body back into balance”. You can always do that work.

And so for those women I think one always starting with the breath truly is the place to start because so many things go wrong with the breathing when you’re pregnant the baby just squashes your diaphragm, which is that muscle that’s underneath your ribcage, and the diaphragm needs to be working properly for the core and the pelvic floor to be working properly.

As you know so really starting in on just retraining how to breathe deeply. You want to take a deep breath in. You want to feel that your ribs go left to right and front to back that will indicate that your diaphragm is dropping down which will mean that the core will relax the pubic bone to relax and then you breathe out and all of those muscles contract. That is the simplest thing you can do.

Then I think really seeking out someone that specializes in this and I specialize in yoga but there are lots of fitness based programs about this there are weightlifting programs based around this about healing your post baby body even if you don’t think that your post baby anymore. Really finding the one that resonates with the type of movement that you like to do because the reality is that there’s very few people in gyms or yoga studios that are trained in these topics. It’s just not covered in a lot of this standard fitness education so finding someone that specializes in that can give you simple movement, simple routines, that you can go through and rebalance your body. And I think you’ll be amazed right you’ll think you’re so far gone but really it doesn’t take that much time once you start doing it to see the positive impact in your body just by working your core a little bit, working your pelvic floor but a little bit opening up those tight muscles in the and the shoulders your you’ll feel so good so quickly and that will then radiate out into everything else you do.

Maranda:

I think that’s beautifully said and I will tell you, not very many people know this and I don’t share this very often but I am certified as a prenatal and postnatal exercise instructor and I don’t use that certification anymore. I don’t share that with anybody because I found that the information that was in it wasn’t very helpful. It didn’t cover the really key things that I have learned from you and from many other experts in the field and it wasn’t pertinent.

So I mean, not all programs are created equal. that’s what I’m saying. Because there’s so much out there and there isn’t a lot of science when it comes to postpartum care for women. Not just in terms of hormone balance and nutrition which is what I teach on and people hear me teach on all the time but also when it comes to how our body functions on a physiological level. And those things are not being studied as as much as they should be. So therefore, there’s a lot of people who are coming out and saying that we have these amazing programs and certification programs that I fell for and it wasn’t anything like I anticipated. It wasn’t great information and again this is why I always come to you because your information it’s solid. It’s everything that anyone could ever want in a program so I really appreciate you preaching others but I’m like “you need Catherine”.

Catherine:

There’s a lot of there are there are a lot of poor programs out there there are a lot of good ones too I think you just you do have to be discerning and see the people who really you can tell that they’re dedicated to the topic is not just like “I’m just gonna throw together this like fitness course too”.

Maranda:

I think it’s just because postpartum is so unique. It is such a unique time in a woman’s body that it’s not something that you can compare really to other areas of a woman’s life. But you can’t compare it to pregnancy. It’s not anything related to pregnancy whatsoever. Well, of course it’s related too but the body operates different. It functions differently and so we can’t come into a postpartum knowing the same information. We have to build from scratch on so many different topics and so that’s why coming to you is so so important.

Can you can you share a little bit about diastasis recti? It is a huge topic. You hear about it all the time, especially in postpartum. There’s also prolapse and incontinence right and we touched base a little bit. But does having one mean that you’re gonna have the others and what’s the most important things to know about healing these things?

Catherine:

Yeah that’s a really good question. So that’s a lot and so much information about all these. Where do I want to go? So does having onemean that you’ll have the other? No. The body is beautiful and interesting and everybody responds differently but what I can say – I’ll define them all before we get started.

So diastasis or diastasis (people say it all differently) is a separation of the top layer of the abdominal muscles, the rectus abdominis. It separates when you’re pregnant. It’s very normal when you’re pregnant and then a connective tissue that connects those two sets of abdominal muscles gets thin and it gets weak so basically the support for your core is now weaker. I will say that this is again normal during pregnancy. Most everyone, like almost a hundred percent of women, have it in our third trimester so everyone will have it to a certain extent immediately postpartum. It really becomes more of an issue when it doesn’t heal naturally in the first few months postpartum and you kind of have it you know six months or a year out. So that’s diastasis.

Prolapse… I’ll go with incontinence first. Incontinence is just being yourself. Basically it is when you leak pee and that is always a sign that something in the system isn’t working right. You know, we moms joke about peeing when we jump on the treadmill. We’ve tried to with normal [daily activities]. It’s not normal. It’s a sign that something’s not working right and we shouldn’t let it just go on because incontinence in your 30s or 40s is depends when you’re 70. That’s not the path that I personally want to go on. That’s incontinence and that is a function of how your pelvic floor is functioning.

And then prolapse is also related to the pelvic floor so the public floor are the muscles that basically support all of the internal organs of your body they connect to the pubic bone right at the front bottom of your pelvis and go back to your tailbone. Prolapse is when something has gone on those muscles are not able to support the internal organs and you actually get internal organs descending out of the body basically. So often it will be a bladder prolapse and so you know if you stick your finger inside your vagina just a little bit you may feel a bulge or something like that that can be an indication of prolapse.

You don’t necessarily get all of them. You could just have diastasis and have nothing going on with your pelvic floor. You could leak pee and not have diastasis. You could have a prolapse and not have anything else so every body responds to them differently. But at least for diastasis and prolapse, those are both pressure issues in the body.

I always like to use the analogy of a balloon. Your core is like a balloon and when you squeeze a balloon, the pressure goes up and you get it’s pushing out in all directions. If you have a weak spot in a balloon and you squeeze it you’re gonna see that weak spot bulge out and that is what I like to use as an analogy for what’s happening. Especially in a diastasis you have a weak spot and you squeeze that pressure like you do all day when you’re twisting and turning and lifting heavy kids, you’ll be pushing pressure out on that already weak connective tissue in your core so it’ll just make it stay and not get better.

Prolapse is when, instead of the pressure going out into the belly, the pressure goes down into the pelvic floor and it puts so much pressure on the pelvic floor that it can’t hold. So the organs start coming out. They’re both caused by some mismanagement of the pressure inside your abdomen, which sounds really complicated and complex but it’s not.

Really it’s just like physics of the body and so for both of those two, the key things for working to correct

those is training your deepest core muscles to get stronger. So working with the deepest muscles in the abdomen and working with the pubic floor muscles to get them stronger so that when you go to pick up something heavy those muscles can engage and you can protect your body from those pressure forces. Does that make sense?

Maranda:

Am I getting into that! I’m loving it keep going.

Catherine:

Okay so that’s one key part of it engaging those deep core muscles and then the other part is really paying attention to how you’re holding your body in your everyday life. When you’re sitting, when you’re standing. Because if the core is a balloon, if I am sitting slouched over, I am squashing that balloon and I’m putting pressure down on the pelvic floor or down out of my diastasis all day long. And in a way where I’m tucking my pelvis under that squash is my balloon so working to get your body aligned, shoulders over hips over heels, gives that balloon the most space possible so that you’re not constantly putting pressure on these weak spots of your body. Then you’re also engaging them working to strengthen them to help those parts of the body heal prolapse. It’s sometimes more complicated than that.

Maranda:

Maybe you can share a little bit about some of the symptoms of people who have diastasis recti or prolapse or incontinence. Maybe incontinence is pretty self-explanatory. You’re peeing when you don’t want to pee. But what are the symptoms outside of this… you touched a little bit on prolapse and  diastasis recti and things like that what can it what does it look like?

And because the symptoms really do go well beyond just the physical. Or the aspects that there’s a little bit more that we should be aware of right? And a little bit more about what that is.

Catherine:

Absolutely. So with the diastasis, a lot of the symptoms relate to not having the stability that you need from your core. Because the core is such a foundational piece for stabilizing your spine, stabilizing your hips, your pelvis. So when the core is weakened as it is with the diastasis you get lots of issues in other places. Some of the most core related symptoms would be one feeling like a limp noodle. That is pretty common. Also kind of that pooch. The belly pooch that just isn’t going away that isn’t always related to diastasis but it does often go along with the diastasis. Some people will see a domed appearance in their belly where the center line sticks out, almost to a triangle, especially if they go to like sit up a little bit like if they’re going to pick up a baby in bed to nurse it they may see that their belly kind of domes up into this triangular position that is a big sign of a diastasis but it also can show up as back pain or hip pain and instability. Again, because the core works to stabilize the spine and the pelvis and so many people will just feel like “oh my back just hurts all the time”. And it may not be a diastasis that’s causing that. There are other causes of back pain but it’s possible that if your core is weak and has a separation that your back is hurting because the core can’t do the job that it’s meant to do. So those are the symptoms of this is.

I did want to speak to incontinence though a little bit because while it is a very simple like you’re just  seeing yourself, the causes of incontinence are complex. Many people just think “oh I have a weak pelvic floor and I should do kegels” but that’s not always the case especially if you do have a weak core.  Sometimes what will happen is the pelvic floor gets overactive just to help stabilize your pelvis a little bit so you actually have these muscles that are working super super hard. And then if you go to do like something like a sneeze, it increases the pressure and your belly balloon.

The pressure goes down, those muscles are already working so hard that then you sneeze and they’re supposed to work even harder but they’re worn out. They can’t and so then you leak because the muscles can’t support it so with incontinence, it’s not always that kegels are the solution. If you have over activity in your pelvic floor then kegels are actually going to make things worse and you’ll feel more discomfort. You’ll feel more pain you might even find yourself leaking more once you’ve started doing kegels because you’re making that hyper activity in the public floor worse.

Maranda:

I am so so grateful that you mentioned that. I was going to ask you about kegels. Like this is a big thing that everybody is talking about how you should do them and now there’s a lot of people coming out saying they’re harmful and hurtful and you should never do them. It’s kind of like it’s become a black or white situation. It’s really hard to decipher what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t so can you speak a little bit more on kegels and and how do we know that we should be doing or not doing them. Because honestly, there’s what, over 30 muscles and the the pelvic region, right? and then kegels is just one, right?

Catherine:

Yeah so basically whenever there’s like a black or white you need to do this or you need to not do this, it’s always wrong is what I’ve learned. That’s kind of the take that I have. I love that is always more nuanced than that. It’s just that the body is never that black and white. So kegals are a fantastic pelvic floor exercise for women who have under active weak pelvic floors. The muscles are just like on a little vacation.

They’re not really excited to get in the game. For those women kegels, are great. They will help get the pelvic floor stronger and make it work better.

How do you know if that’s you? This gets a little more complicated. It’s always very complicated. It gets more complicated though because some of the symptoms are the same so if you have an underactive public floor you might leak but you may also leak if you have an overactive pelvic floor where the muscles are working too hard. So often the signs that I give for underactive pelvic floor are things that don’t feel quite the same in during intercourse. Like it’s a little more loosey-goosey down there and you know there’s… it feels like the muscles are loose. You may have if you’re menstruating you may have trouble keeping a tampon in or a menstrual cup in because your body just isn’t it doesn’t have the strength.

And more interestingly, these people also, in general, are people with weaker pelvic floors often (not always) are more relaxed in general. Like they’re just kind of like, their pelvic floor does what they do in life and just goes hand in hand. The way you do anything is the  way you do everything whereas with an overactive pelvic floor, those women are more likely to have pelvic pain. So maybe pain during  intercourse pain trying to insert a tampon pain. When they do kegels, they may have trouble emptying their bladder because the muscles are constricting and they may they also tend to be a little bit more type-a, more high-strung. So is their pelvic floor and another symptom of an overactive pelvic floor is that they have trouble taking a deep breath because their pelvic floor is so tight it doesn’t allow the diaphragm to drop down all the way. So they just can’t get a deep breath in.

But many women will have a little bit of both – some women will have one side that is weak one side that is overactive because the pelvic floor is so tied to the muscles of the inner thigh and the muscles of the lower abdomen and the muscles of the back. So it can be hard to discern. If you really want to know, the best thing to do is go see a public floor physical therapist. They can do a manual exam and they can really let you know exactly what is going on. I always recommended every woman to do that off the bat.

Maranda:

Oh my gosh, you’re right. But that is if you have one nearby. If you have the resources to do that too. It’s a really great way just to get an expert who can actually go internal to find out what is going on in your pubic floor and who’s really trained to do that because often times, and in postpartum when we’re we at the six to eight week mark and we go into our OB or family practitioner and they do the internal exam and they’re like “you’re good”… I mean they’re not checking for these things. They’re not trained to check for these things and to find out how your muscles are operating. There they’re only to look at scar tissue to make sure that your cervix looks like cervix that is functioning okay and looks like a mom who’s given birth for the second or third or fourth time.

Catherine:

Yep, it’s in the proper space for and how many kids you have. There’s no scarring, you’re good. No bleeding, no pain, awesome. You’re done here. It’s all they cover. That’s and a form anyway. They don’t even do an internal exam. I’ve heard so many women… they’re just like “my provider didn’t even touch me” and I was like “yeah that’s crazy”.

Maranda:

There’s not enough training. This is not their expertise and most of them can’t even tell you if you have a prolapse. That’s one of the reasons why because their [pelvic floor phsical therapist] with knowledge who specializes in women’s health care. Thank you for bringing that up. Good topic. And we can go on and on with that one in and of itself.

So tell us one last thing: what is the most important piece of information that somebody needs to know about really rebuilding their core after childbirth, whether immediately or in the first four months or for several years.

Catherine:

I know it’s a good one. I think the thing that I always want moms to know is that they don’t have to settle for pain or a body that’s not functioning the way that they want it to or feeling like they have to kind of sit on the sidelines of their life because their body isn’t, you know, “behaving the way they want it to” and so that to me feels like the most important message. I think that we have poor messages that we give to mothers so often. You know we give them so much attention when they are pregnant and then in the postpartum period it’s like you’re you’re just on your own this is it this is as good as it gets. I just don’t want anyone to ever have to settle with a body that isn’t behaving the way they want it to. Now that’s not saying it’s going to ever be exactly the way it was before you had a baby. You are a new person. That baby that you birthed, you also birthed yourself into a new new body and a new life. But  pain and discomfort are unnecessary and if you’re you’re feeling that then you unfortunately have to be the one that seeks out the support because there aren’t a lot.

Doctors aren’t probably going to say like “hey did you know you could fix this?” So if you’re feeling that don’t settle and take action because it will be so worth it. You don’t have to miss out on running around in the yard with your kids or going on a hike somewhere cool. Those are things that are really really valuable and you don’t want to miss them.

Maranda:

Beautifully, beautifully said. So how can people take action with you? You have a master class. Can you tell everybody about that?

Catherine:

Yes, I have two master classes actually. I have a master class that is all about how to modify your yoga practice for diastasis. So if someone wants to do yoga and has this core separation then they can go on this master class and they can learn basically what not to do and what to do while they’re doing yoga so that they don’t make their core worse in their yoga practice like I did. And also, if someone doesn’t know I have a blog post that has a diastasis self check, which I can send to you Maranda, if you want to include that.

Maranda:

I’d love to, yes!

Catherine:

And then the other masterclass is a happy hips master class. This is something that I didn’t realize so many women were struggling with but many many women postpartum have ongoing hip issues. Their SI joint may be constantly out of whack. They may feel that they have to wake up lots of times in the night because their hips hurt so this masterclass goes through some of the key imbalances that pregnancy creates in a body that can impact the hips. We go through some simple muscle tests just so you can figure out which ones are impacting you and which ones are not.

So yeah, those are both available and you’ll put the links to those there and then I have a new podcast that is called Rise Rooted and this really kind of steps beyond just the physical but really it’s designed to give women all sorts of resources to care for themselves so that they can step into whatever bigger purpose they want to in their life.

Maranda:

I am so excited because this is absolutely amazing. This podcast is new for you. It launched two days ago I know I got the email and I was like *ahhh* and I look forward to hearing more from you in that podcast and I will be sure to drop all of the links and the notes here so that all of you can have this.

For all of you who are listening to Catherine here, make sure that you go you click on those links, follow her information and advice. And thank you so so much for being here. I am so blessed to have you and to have you share with everyone your amazing information. Thank you.

Catherine:

No thank you. Thank you for all you do for your momma’s and thank you for having me. Beautiful things.

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